Weather modification

As late as the 1890s experiments were conducted in the United States in the hope of producing rain by setting off charges of dynamite lofted by balloons or kites. No positive results were reported, however. More promising were the cloud-seeding experiments of the 1940s, in which silver iodide was released into clouds as smoke or solid carbon dioxide broadcast into clouds from airplanes. The results are still uncertain for increasing precipitation. The lessons learned from cloud seeding, however, have had other successful applications, such as the dispersal of low-level supercooled fog at airports (the first system designed for this purpose, the Turboclair fog-dissipation system, was set up in 1970 at Orly airport in Paris).

The inadvertent weather modification that has followed industrialization and the building of large cities has, however, already produced measurable changes in local climate and may someday produce effects more widespread. The introduction of some 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year from the burning of fuels may in time raise the Earth’s average temperature. Cities affect the flow of wind, warm the atmosphere over them, and send pollutants into the sky. Updrafts and an abundance of condensation nuclei may increase rainfall and winter fog and reduce sunshine and daylight.

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The studies of the solid Earth and the water on and within it and the air around it are called Earth sciences. Included in the Earth sciences are the geological, the hydrological, and the atmospheric sciences, which are concerned respectively with the nature and behavior of the Earth itself, the water, and the air. (See also Earth; geology; ocean; atmosphere.)